The Tender Pulse of Feeling
Here in the North we've reached our longest days. But although the solstice itself receives the most attention, a more memorable event for me occurred earlier in the week – this being the appearance of the moon's first crescent. By the Meeus system, this marked the beginning of lunation 327.
It was after ten-thirty pm, a still summer's evening, the sky not yet dark enough for stars. I was sitting out at the garden table, by lantern light. The bat that roosts in my eaves was hunting the bounds of the garden, and was my only company – the slight rustling of its wings the only sound, and the day at last cooling after one of the hottest of the year, the air at last loosening. We marvel at the bat, at its agility, creating a universe from reflected sound, navigating in ways we cannot imagine.
I glanced up and suddenly there, emerging from behind clouds, was the moon. Low in the west, it rode a shallow ecliptic towards its setting. It was like a sickle, or a bull's horns. And riding the upper horn was a lone pin-prick of steady light – the planet Venus. Just below, a little further along the ecliptic another prick of light – Jupiter.
Of Venus, I once wrote:
...holder of our soul's desire:
The treasure of reunion,
With what was lost
In exchange for life,
And which we seek in love,
In beauty, and in spirit forms.
And of Jupiter:
Seeker of the Sovereign Self,
Amid a vale of illusion.
Revealer of purpose, through vision,
Through pattern in the primordial chaos.
...the symbols of all meaning.
Snatches from a tone poem on the mythic, on the planets as archetypes, and the moon of course, that great vessel of dreams, galleon of the night.
Mother Moon, first gate
On the inward path.
You offer glimpses
Of self-reflection,
And tender pulse of feeling,
In the dark night of the soul.
I watched its slow ride, until a spill of cloud – honey coloured against the deepening azure of night – obscured it. Then I went to bed. But in the sleeping, there arose a dreaming, and it was of that same crescent moon, with Venus riding the upper horn, and Jupiter leading the descent. And then the night came on proper, and the stars shone, but with an intensity only dreams can deliver.
It was a blaze of stars, and then a line of aeroplanes, like migrating birds, nose to tail, strung out in a line. They formed a river, crossing from one horizon to the other, and each cartoonified like those little symbols on a flight radar map. It was an entire people, the whole world in motion, all heading in the same direction.
But there was something lonely about each of those symbols, and I woke with the impression of a narrow fuselage and an oblivion to the breadth and beauty, and the sheer numinous radiance of the starry night through which the people flew. Or rather their view, their perspective, was restricted by the severe vignette of their narrow, slot-shaped windows. And as I pondered the dream, the windows became our phones, and the vignette was a closing down of our vision, so that we each lived in our own universe, unable to understand the language, the perspective, the pain or the joys of one another, even though we are all heading the same way.
As I thought back on the dream, it was unclear where the dream had begun, and the reality of the crescent moon, and the bat, and the cool of a summer's night, had left off. They had merged into one mythic image. And I wrote:
Venus rides the moon,
gentle upon this tide of dreams,
while Jupiter leads,
and the world in flight
going the other way.
Because that was the other observation, that the motion of the moon was from left to right, and the migration of souls was a juxtaposition – the mythic, the symbolic, moving in one direction, unseen but for me, and the whole the world moving in the other. But this was not a judgement, for I've found dreams never accuse. It was more an invitation to enquiry, to run the dream through the mind and to see what thoughts arose from it.
Of course, I was not the only person to have watched the moon that night, perhaps not even the only one to have set sail into their dreams, launched upon that mythic imagery. But that was the story the dreaming told, and certainly it was that sense of isolation I woke with – and the question too: was it worth spending time teasing meaning from those images, and making an accounting of them, when such poetry does not even touch the sides, when a crazy cat video will garner a million clicks.
In other words: what does it profit the obscure thought in an age of memes?
But I've thought, and surfed the tide, and had the dream tease me this way and that, and I've written an account of it anyway. Indeed, I have written several accounts of it, merged them into the novel I'm writing, and which I may never finish. And I've made an accounting of it here because it is a growing theme in my thinking, and a question: how can we read the world mythically, and orient ourselves by it?
It may not make any more sense than it did before – at least not in words. But the images become slender threads, leading into a deeper dreaming of interconnection, one in which beauty becomes not merely observed, but strangely intimate...
So many of us are engaged in a search for meaning, without knowing what that looks or feels like. We mistake it for affirmation, for status perhaps, but these things are fleeting, the connections fragile, breaking away at the slightest jolt of reality. But if we can take a moment to attend to images, to dreams, even if such attention appears irrelevant in the greater cultural milieu, there I think we find our direction, our tender pulse of feeling.